Mother on national standards warpath

BY JIM CHIPP

A Khandallah mother says the Government cannot force national standards on schools if parents do not choose to accept them.

Education Minister Ann Tolley has introduced national standards to compare literacy and numeracy rates across all primary schools. The move has been welcomed by some and criticised by others, including the teachers' union, the New Zealand Education Institute.

All schools will be compelled to provide the ministry with every pupil's performance data on standard assessments.

However, Monique Watson, who has three young children, said parents who disagreed with the standards could write to their children's school and instruct it not to pass on private information to any third party, including the Ministry of Education.

She said the Office of the Privacy Commissioner had confirmed that she had grounds for objecting to the Education Ministry acquiring her son's personal information, including assessment results.

"Here the law is on my side," she said. "Principal 11 of the Privacy Act states that ... `Personal information must not be disclosed."'

The commission advisers told her this principle could be over-ridden by a provision in legislation such as the Education Act, or if one of the purposes of collecting the information in the first place was to pass it on to the ministry.

Ms Watson said no such provision appeared to exist.

"It may be policy to pass on the information to the Ministry of Education, but there currently is no legislation compelling schools to do so," she said.

"Individuals and schools are free to opt out. I will request our school to withhold the results from the ministry. Then it is up to the ministry to prove the legal onus is on the schools to do otherwise."

If the information was partly gathered for the ministry's benefit, it was up to the ministry to prove in court that its right to the information over-rode the parents' and children's privacy rights, she said.

Ms Watson said she was not totally opposed to national standards.

"It would be good to have benchmarks between the schools so that a child at this age can expect to fall between these marks," she said.

"My objection is that once you start delivering those results to a third party and matching them you have opened another can of worms, another Pandora's box," she said.

"The low-performing schools will lose students, lose funding and in the end they will lose the ability to offer services. Schools will close and the Government will save money," she said.

"A hastily-implemented, ill thought-out policy has the potential to affect a large proportion of the population, students and families," she said.

- The Wellingtonian